March 20, 2008

Obama Campaign Wrong On ''No Iran- Al Qaeda Role'' (Updated)

Susan Rice, a senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, told the NY Sun yesterday that surely McCain must know that Iran is not engaged with Al Qaeda in Iraq, and suggested that McCain is either confused or is cynically trying to conflate Al Qaeda and Iran as Cheney and Bush did Al Qaeda and Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

Related: Who's Ignorant? (It is the AP (and other media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times - edit: and the Obama camp) that fails to understand the relationship between Iran and Sunni terrorists, not John McCain. The AP's statement that there is "no evidence that al-Qaida has benefited from Iranian assistance" is flatly wrong, and shows a breathtaking level of ignorance. ... In fact, there is a long history of assistance and cooperation flowing between Iran and al Qaeda, as Tom Joscelyn summarizes here. To take just one example, the September 11 Commission found that there was "cooperation on operations" between Iran and al Qaeda)